


Entropy

by Annerb



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-18
Updated: 2013-06-18
Packaged: 2017-12-15 09:36:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/848011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annerb/pseuds/Annerb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They've been here before. "Forget Me Not" Post-Ep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entropy

This is the way it’s been between them from the beginning—she drawing nearer, him pushing away just enough to force her to the periphery until something started slipping again, the distance eroding. She remembers it as dizzying and frustrating, but something almost like breathing.

She wonders if she’d gotten too used to the pull, the moving apart and together. Maybe that’s why she was always running away from him, always the one to slip just out of reach, right after he finally let her in. Maybe she was just trying to relive the feel of it.

Maybe she always assumed he would follow.

Only now he’s cut the string between them, and everything is stillness.

She isn’t so much stuck as rooted. This warped city, this lab, it has become a home for her, a center. Nick and Greg, but also new faces, bringing a freshness and energy to what otherwise can feel like casual suffocation. (She knows this, has been dragged down by broken little girls too many times before.) She feels steady here, strong and fierce and buttressed and invincible.  She feels exactly what this place once meant to him.

Once. But no longer.

He’d left because while now he drifts across the world on a breeze of whimsy and opportunity, staying in Vegas had been an anchor around his waist in a watery expanse.

He can’t come back. She knows this. But she also can’t go 

An impasse. Painful, airless stillness.

They’ve been here before.

She survives because she knows that life is never still for long. This job shows her that on a daily basis. She wades through the debris of people’s lives, sees the way human cruelty can tip everything on its axis, shift the steadiest foundation. Knows that breezes shift without any warning.

She waits. She works and waits and listens for that first telltale creak. A shift of air. 

So they can begin again. 


End file.
